Classic WoW’s botting problems are a failure of Blizzard to enforce fair play. Putting unfair play into the heart of the game system does not solve this problem, obviously.
Generally speaking, winning in an open game like wow, is just reaching your goals.
Some people win by getting a lot of achievements, pet battles or uncompetitive stuff like that.
Most players have goals like pushing keys, finish the raid or get high pvp rating, which are what we call compeititve goals.
All of those goals are made easier, the stronger your character is, commonly we say that those goals are tied to character- or player power.
Now here comes the problem. Blizzard introduced the corruption system, which was a massive RNG barrier to obtain this player power.
I did the math and if you killed a decent number of mythic bosses (8-10) and did a weekly key every week, then you would get a BiS corruption piece at a good ilvl every 17-25 weeks, which is ridiculous.
We can relate it a bit to titanforging, where getting your BiS trinket is something like a 1 in a 100, which was also really bad, but there was a major difference, and that is the sheer impact it had on player power, sometimes called the delta damage between regular item and powered item.
scaling numbers to today, having 7 bis items mythic max warforged is maybe a 5-10k increase in damage at best on aoe (4 targets, standard mplus sim), but having 7 items with bis corruption for me, was a 126k dps increase, no joke, that is 50% increased damage, that is so massive that no amount of skill can really make up for it, if the player with the gear is somewhat competent.
This very inflated impact gear had on your power, and the fact that that gear could be bought on the auction house, meant that i could put down 30m gold, which is 2280 euros ish (if you had the gold, way more if you bought tokens to get it), and get a 60k dps increase for small dungeon pulls, which is pretty massive.
It all came down to the fact that you could buy massive player power, that was in no way realistically obtainable, for gold, which is tied to real money.
When you can buy boes last patch, that cost 100k maybe and were not better than any mythic item you could get from farm, that was fine, but being able to buy something, that you couldn’t just go get no matter how good you were, along with how much better that item was, is what made it pay2win.
Good news is that with the corruption vendor, this is no longer a problem and the game is no longer pay2win.
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to “win the game” would be to:
- collect all mounts (basically impossible cause rng)
- collect all pets (basically impossible cause rng)
- collect all toys (basically impossible cause rng)
- collect all transmog (basically impossible cause rng)
- complete all achievements (basically impossible because of the sheer amount that have been put in and what they ask you to do)
- complete all dungeons (impossible cause of M+)
- complete the last raid (far less possible these days than in the past. how many people have cleared mythic Nya’lotha compared to how many cleared heroic 25 ICC?)
- have BIS (basically impossible because of gearing system)
- be exalted with all factions. (possible to be exalted, but can be basically impossible cause of rng & paragon thus not letting you get all faction items)
heavy reliance on rng + no finish line = no end ever, and a harder way to ever feel real accomplishment.
what you’re mentioning though is not the stereotypical pay to win as seen in other games, but with the wow token, it is easier than ever (if you’re willing to waste real £) to just buy high gear on AH rather than earn it. the fact that method and others were able to put themselves in debt of about $40,000 for the last world first race shows that taking such action can give an advantage.
not actual p2w, but close enough to negatively impact the game to a significant enough degree.
you would have won that expansion? the next expansion would be a new game with its own finish line.
goal of an mmo? to live up to its name?
massivly
multiplayer
online.
didn’t see anything about not letting players complete the game. its just blizz have removed what few goalposts were left to keep us endlessly running on the spot like dr strange in that corridor scene.
You win when you cleared 12/12 M - have rating in each bracket 3000+ and are constantly clearing 25/26/27 keys while having a big achievement/mount collection
40k eur for world #2 
Jokes aside that’s pretty much the opposite of pay2win. Method is a much bigger and more structured organization than Limit. They have so much more money and influence and yet spending 40 000 Eur on a video game still didn’t make them win against something that is much more a guild than Method is.
Aparently there is a player (Xirev on Vashj EU ) that got ALL achievements. Thats how you win WOW. 
Got all achievement points*
Most of the actually impressive achievements in the game (CE, glad, feats of strength in general) do not count towards that, so i would say CE + KM + glad > full achievement points.
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